Another tragic death

The word "legendary" finally died today. It had been on life support for some time, but it took the Chicago Tribune to push it over the edge:

Alexis Cohen, legendary 'American Idol' contestant, killed in hit-and-run in New Jersey

Legendary for her cursing rant against Simon Cowell

I acknowledge that this is a tragedy for her family and friends, and I'm not trying to make light of her death.

But when a headline writer for a major metropolitan newspaper destroys the meaning of a word in some lame bid to draw attention to one of the more minor stories of the year, it is not wrong to wonder just how low our standards will go.

Gettin' all renegade-y

A lot of people have already commented on TIME's cover story on Sarah Palin, and I'm certainly not going to go through the whole thing - it's all I could do to read it. It's a curious piece, one almost obsessed with creating an image of Palin as quintessentially Alaskan, and thus foreign to normal understanding. There is some talk of her negatives, but that all seems to get washed away in a tide of admiration, forced, I suppose, by the attempt to explain her appeal. But there is, along with a Web sidebar titled "See the fashion looks of Sarah Palin," which probably never accompanied a TIME story about Eisenhower, this:

Whether that is true or not, Palin's unconventional step speaks to an ingrained frontier skepticism of authority — even one's own. Given the plunging credibility of institutions and élites, that's a mood that fits the Palin brand. Résumés ain't what they used to be; they count only with people who trust credentials — a dwindling breed. The mathematics Ph.D.s who dreamed up economy-killing derivatives have pretty impressive résumés. The leaders of congressional committees and executive agencies have decades of experience — at wallowing in red ink, mismanaging economic bubbles and botching covert intelligence.

If ever there has been a time to gamble on a flimsy résumé, ever a time for the ultimate outsider, this might be it.

This is simply claptrap, not illuminating at all. That we should believe that Palin stepped away from the governorship because of her "ingrained frontier skepticism" of her own authority is almost insulting. It suggests that she doesn't trust herself to run something, and, while I think a little self-doubt is a good thing, this is not exactly the quality we look for in a president.

We still trust credentials a lot, as we don't ask our barber to take a little off the top and fill a bicuspid while he's at it. We might be starting to understand that credentials don't guarantee wisdom, but I don't think that credentialism is on the wane at all. If anything, it's become more prevalent as we tell our kids that the only road to success leads through college.

What's interesting is the title used on the cover of the print edition: The Renegade. I believe we're supposed to admire Palin for taking "the road less traveled." And this seems strangely reminiscent of another politician, one who bucked the system, voted his conscience, a press-deemed "maverick."

And as I wrote about John McCain close to a year ago:

Is it possible that John McCain, the original maverick, thinks that "maverick" implies random, unexplainable decisions, rather than adhering to a set of principles that are sometimes at odds with a party's orthodoxy? Because I think the people think that McCain is the latter, and I'm beginning to suspect that McCain is the former.

As entertaining as the press may find randomness, it seems a very poor quality to seek out in our leaders. A little unpredictability may be admirable; running amok rarely is.

Win-win vs. positive-sum

I really shouldn't have to go through this again, but a panel discussion on Charlie Rose last night makes it clear that we have a long way to go. The discussion concerned free trade; unfortunately the panel was severely skewed, offering a former U.S. trade representative, two economists, and the hapless Senator Sherrod Brown (D-OH), who was the only one trying to provide any dissent from pro-free trade orthodoxy. He offered very little that was coherent, especially in light of the relentlessly sunny views expressed by Susan Schwab, Jagdish Bhagwati, and Alan Blinder.

Let me take up one point that came up a lot in the testifying by former Bush trade representative Schwab. She tried several times to conflate "positive-sum game" with "win-win," and everyone just sat there and let her get away with it. I have no doubt that Bhagwati and Blinder get the distinction, but calling her out would have undercut an argument that they fully supported.

As I went through in some detail last month, the two concepts are not at all identical. Win-win does imply positive-sum, but the opposite is most definitely not true, particularly (but not absolutely) when there are more than two parties to a transaction. It is quite possible to posit that trade is a positive-sum game, yet still find that there are winners and losers, that large numbers of people will not net any benefit.

Let me try another example. Let's say I ask Charlie Rose to give me $10, and also ask him to get 99 of his friends to give me $10. I take this $1000 and, through a magical process (oh, let's call it free trade), I turn it into $1500. I then give Charlie back $800, tell him that returns weren't guaranteed, and walk away with $700. The system as a whole is wealthier by $500 (positive-sum, oh yeah!), but we have a win-lose-lose-(98 more lose's) proposition; Charlie and all of his friends are worse off than they were before.

It is popular to try to identify these two principles as equivalent. "Positive-sum" sounds kind of wonky, while "win-win" is clear and positive and cool. But all we can absolutely say about free trade is that it's positive-sum; we cannot, using classical economics, determine the distribution of those positive returns.

To be fair, there was a little discussion of the fact that some people do lose from free trade, and Sen. Brown tried to make the point that those people are almost invariably Americans. But the rest pooh-poohed the idea that the number of losers was significant, and Blinder in particular threw out the standard canard that all we need to fix the problem is enhanced benefits, retraining, trade adjustment assistance - you know, all those programs that aren't really working all that well now.

In general, I'm for free trade. It gives me access to goods I would not otherwise have, probably at somewhat lower prices than a purely domestic market would offer me. It makes me feel good to know that we're giving the rest of the world's people the opportunity to improve themselves through some means other than direct aid.

But that doesn't mean we should use specious arguments to get there. One of the more uncomfortable moments in the discussion was when Blinder contended that it was a failure of the economics profession that it hasn't "persuaded the general public of the virtues of comparative advantage and trade across nations," as if the problems presented by free trade could be washed away with the right marketing campaign. Americans may not be as well-informed on such matters as we would like, but they can see what's happening right in front of them.

I will point out, yet again, that our systems are human constructs, made for the benefit of actual people - if they don't work right, we need to fix them so they achieve the goals of our society.

Confusing "positive-sum" with "win-win" is misleading. Lumping free trade in labor together with free trade in goods is misleading; the markets are very different, and have differing objectives. Vague hand-waving as to how we might redistribute some of the gains from free trade doesn't accomplish anything. There's a tendency to inflate the gains from trade to make the orthodox view more acceptable. And the "fair trade" people have a point, should we really allow corporations to make huge returns off of environmental and labor law arbitrage?

My basic point is that this issue is far more complicated than drawing a two-country, two-good graph and pointing to the gains (which is about as far as most economists seem to want to take it). There are real costs to real people when we allow their careers to be offshored; they are, in effect, subsidizing the people who are taking advantage of that opportunity. Maybe that's OK, but I'd sure like to see economists and politicians and businessmen have to express it in just that way, rather than shouting down the people who point it out.

Thresholds

Everyone's got a blog now. People, from famous to not, are creating Facebook pages, though there are those few stubborn holdouts who cling to their MySpace pages. And now there's Twitter, and even the most hardened reporters are jumping on board; Philip Hersh of the Chicago Tribune is tweeting, even though he admits it will mostly consist of links to other stuff.

Of course, there's the recently reported stat that Twitter loses more than half its devotees each month, though there are theories that the number is inaccurate because of the way the data is collected (it may not be fully accounting for phone usage). But that's a bit off-topic.

I have no idea how the internal workings of our newspapers are grinding these days, but I would guess that Hersh didn't wake up the other day and say to himself, "I feel the need to tweet." I believe that it is much more like my speculation in my March post, The future of journalism, in which I mused that there would be ever greater pressure on news reporters to turn out endless streams of copy for platforms of all types, whether they be print or a blog or Twitter or so forth.

So my question is, what will be the threshold of acceptance for a platform to be added to the list? If someone comes out tomorrow with Twitter+, a site that requires one to write messages of 141-280 characters, how will organizations know when they should jump on that bandwagon? After all, we know that the most popular blogs are overrepresented by the writers who started up around 2003. Facebook probably seemed more useful before everyone had a page. And I have to think that new Twitterers are likely to be lost in the noise. So there's likely to be quicker movement to the next big thing, even if it turns out to be not so big.

I'd expect a lot of time to be wasted as people and organizations chase the future, and I wonder just how evanescent our information is likely to become.

He's back!

As he promised, John McIntyre, erstwhile copy editor at the sad Baltimore Sun, is back on the web. So we were only without him for a couple of days, which is a very good thing. You can enjoy his, well, I can't say it better than he:

Observations on language and the craft of editing, with additional reflections on subjects of no necessary connection with the former topics. Comments are welcome, and commenters are invited to keep a civil tongue in their heads.

at You Don't Say (that's right, unlike Larry "Bud" Melman, a name that NBC kept when Dave Letterman moved to CBS, the Sun has allowed Mr. McIntyre to take the name with him). [And I give the Sun credit for providing the link, without which I might have had trouble following this blog.]

His first non-welcome post is about the national conference of the American Copy Editors Society. I guess they're all in Minneapolis, at least if you read the sports section of the Chicago Tribune today to discover that the Marlins scored their game-winning runs in the 9th inning yesterday - I was watching the game, and could swear that the runs came in the 10th, but who am I to argue with a great metropolitan newspaper?

An unfortunate loss

I've ruminated before on how a relationship between bloggers can feel like a friendship in that you get to know someone on at least some level as they write day after day.  Given the somewhat tenuous nature of "real" friendships, it's not a surprise to me at all that the virtual world can seem just as vivid; I may not be cracking a beer with Eric Zorn of the Chicago Tribune, but I do have a look into his mind several times a day.

I understand there's an unfortunate asymmetry there.  I read Zorn, but, as far as I know, he doesn't read me; since I'm not a crazy wild stalker guy, I get that we're not really friends in any definition of the word.  But I know more about what he thinks and feels, what things concern him, than I do about the majority of people I would call friends (at some point I should write a post on my "friends," because they are just about the least friend-like people I can imagine, for the folks who never initiate contact to the 20-year-long acquaintance who always makes plans to see me when she's in town and never quite is able to make it happen...but I digress).

When a regular poster leaves for whatever reason, there is a feeling of loss.  I know there are people still saddened at the passing of Tanta at Calculated Risk.  Today, the economics of the newspaper business has caught up with John McIntyre of the Baltimore Sun, the copy editor whose ruminations on language and newspapers (and Wikipedia and so on) have offered insight and entertainment and food for thought on the blog You Don't Say.  I will miss him (though he promises to keep blogging).

My first temptation is to take You Don't Say off my blogroll.  After all, why should I want to drive traffic to the site of a newspaper that would lay off my friend?  On the other hand, his work still lives there, so I should probably suggest you go there, partake of his thinking, but not to look at any ads you might find.  However, the click counts will remain, so I remain caught on the horns.  I shall agree to disagree with myself, and allow inertia to leave the link, for now.

There's not much I can offer that's fresh about the implications for the newspaper business, except for this.  Mr. McIntyre has spent 23 years at the Sun, and so, whatever his age, is not in the first blush of youth.  However, he has embraced new technology, the blog, the Twitter feed, the e-mail.  He hasn't been shuffling around metal sorts while his younger colleagues smiled sadly and indulgently as they slipped his work into the computer typesetting system.  And none of that was sufficient to save his position in the cold hard calculus of today's media business.  I'll leave it to the reader to infer what he or she can about anyone's future in this economy.

Walk on - McGwire/Noonan edition

Not to keep beating on Peggy Noonan (oh, why not?), but her unconscionable remark of last Sunday about prosecution of those who condoned illegal torture ("Some things in life need to be mysterious. Sometimes you need to just keep walking. ... It's hard for me to look at a great nation issuing these documents and sending them out to the world and thinking, oh, much good will come of that.") seems to engender ever more thoughts. I wrote some here, and Andrew Sullivan continues to follow up, this time by quoting Hilzoy at Obsidian Wings:

If most people tried to make the case that prosecuting their criminal acts was just "looking backwards", or a sign that the prosecutor was motivated by a desire for retribution, they'd be laughed out of court. Imagine the likely reaction if your average crack dealer were to urge the judge not to dwell on the past, or if someone who used accounting fraud to flip houses told offered a prosecutor the chance to be "very Mandelalike in the sense [of] saying let the past be the past and let us move into the future", or if I were pulled over for speeding and, when asked if I knew how fast I was going, replied that "Some things in life need to be mysterious ... Sometimes you need to just keep walking." I don't think any of us would get very far.

And I'm reminded of Mark McGwire, baseball player. He is, famously, the player who hit 583 home runs (with 70 in a single season) who, after retirement, testified in a Congressional hearing investigating steroids in baseball:

I'm not here to talk about the past. I'm here to be positive about this subject.

That testimony made McGwire the poster boy for all that's wrong in sports today, and has made it highly unlikely that he will have a serious shot at the Baseball Hall of Fame in the near term. His attempt to erase the past was seen as evasion, and called all his accomplishments into question.

And, if the world were fair, we would do the same to Peggy Noonan. The contrast between her status as a journalist and her unwillingness to discover the truth of American-approved torture would be seen as disqualifying, and we would not only not grant her the honors she continues to receive, we would efface her from her role as leading light pundit. Her name should be just as much a joke as is that of Mark McGwire.

The new journalism

I've talked about Dean Baker before.  His blog, Beat The Press, gives an economist's take on the way financial news is reported in the media (at least, the New York Times, the Washington Post, and a very few others).  I do enjoy reading it, but, to be honest, it's one of those where, if Baker put a general statement at the top, he could save us all a lot of trouble.  (I suggested this earlier this month, that a lot of the traffic on even the best blogs could be reduced if there was a statement of principles: "Andrew Sullivan supports all measures that allow gays to marry" would eliminate 10-20% of his posts, I think.)

Baker could do the same - why do we worry about protectionism in manufacturing when we don't care about doctors and lawyers? - and save himself a lot of writing.  But that's a minor quibble, he doesn't post that much anyway.

He's often at his most amusing when writing about the objectivity of journalism.  He's pretty old school, believing (as I do) that there is value in separating reporting from editorializing, that there is such a thing as objective writing without opinion, and he is outraged when that fails to happen.  Today he's written about a New York Times story about the apparent suicide of the CFO of Freddie Mac, and he notes:

It is hard to understand how these statements appeared in a news story. The article is speculating on issues about which it has no factual information. These comments might be appropriate for an oped, but they are not news.

That's the kind of statement very common in Baker posts, and I agree, but I also see what's happening to traditional journalism.  Perhaps he should have read my post of March 18, The future of journalism:

So what I think is going to happen is that reporters are going to have to become brands, and they will be charged with providing an endless stream of content that can be "repurposed" by "content managers" (no editors here) to the various media platforms that are part of the modern news organization.... We'll see more "controversial" writers in place of solid thinking and writing (hence, new media star Karl Rove).

Blame blogging or cable news for it if you must, but news consumers are increasingly comfortable with the idea of digesting opinions with their news.  I'm not convinced they're any better at separating fact from opinion, but they're used to having it all mixed together.  Not a lot of value is attached to old-style objective reporting.

So Baker had better get used to the kinds of stories at which he rails.  I think they're ever more likely, and we'll probably never really appreciate what we've lost.

Noonan - Part 2

Andrew Sullivan:

Am I the only one to free associate from Peggy Noonan's infamous quote last Sunday to the church sex abuse crisis?...And it's the same reasoning: your loyalty to an institution requires covering up its crimes, not exposing them. But there is one difference: child abuse was not the actual policy of the Vatican. Torture was the actual policy of the Bush White House. And still she walks on.

I'm sure we could find any number of other analogies, once we get into it.

How can we miss her if she never goes away?

From Philadelphia:

He mishandled her national rollout to the public, botched her relationship with the media and now supporters of Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin are charging Sen. John McCain with snubbing his former running mate during an interview on NBC’s “Tonight Show With Jay Leno” Monday night.

Mr. McCain is coming under fire for his conspicuous memory lapse when listing the names of Republican governors who could be the next in line to challenge President Barack Obama in 2012. Mrs. Palin did not make the cut.

“We have, I’m happy to say, a lot of voices out there,” Mr. McCain told host Jay Leno before listing Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal, Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty, Utah Gov. Jim Huntsman, former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, and Florida Gov. Charlie Crist. “There are a lot of governors out there who are young and dynamic.”

Let's back up a minute. He "mishandled her national rollout," he "botched her relationship with the media"?

John McCain, whatever he might have improved operationally, took a no-name governor from a small-population state and turned her into a national figure by tapping her as his running mate. Without McCain, Palin doesn't have a PAC, isn't on everyone's short list for consideration in 2012 or 2016, is as obscure as Donald Carcieri.

She sat in the interview with Katie Couric, not John McCain. She was the one unable to answer simple questions, a lack that proved to a lot of people that she was nowhere near the level we'd expect of someone very likely to take over the presidency.

I understand that this Joe Murray who wrote the article is a former staffer for Wildmon's American Family Association, so unbiased journalism is not remotely possible here, but couldn't he at least try to be credible in making an argument?

Ripped from today's headlines

From the first page of the sports section of today's Chicago Tribune:

(In a story about the Masters golf tournament) Shark attack: The new groom (Mr. Chris Evert) and perennial bridesmaid (three second-place finishes) returns to Augusta for the first time since 2002 - and as the sentimental favorite

Yes, but who is it? The reader must guess.

And:

(In a story about yesterday's White Sox loss) The Sox were shut out 11 times last season, but they couldn't produce an extra-base hit after seizing a 4-2 victory on Jim Thome's dramatic three-run homer in Tuesday's regular-season opener.

This sentence is just a train wreck.

Any chance we can get John McIntyre, professional copy editor, to move to Chicago?

The good, the bad...TIME edition

The current issue of TIME magazine is a disconcerting mix of good news, bad news, and something in between. The bad news is an article about four countries, Ireland, Spain, Taiwan, and Singapore, and how they're hurting in the current financial crisis. Ireland, for example, is suffering the bounce effect of globalization; many of the jobs that came there from the United States over the last decade are now moving again, to Eastern Europe. It would be good if someone could tell us where all the jobs will eventually land, then we could all move there - Abidjan, anyone?

There is little hope in any of these countries. Ireland hopes to use wind and water to get a toehold in renewable energy, Singapore's diversity is not protecting it against a systemic downturn, Spain is not certain of being able to employ anybody, and Taiwan may have to embrace the mainland to keep their economy going. Even countries that made many of the right choices are facing unpleasantness.

The in-between news is an essay with photos on the plight of Detroit. This once-proud city is now under a million in population, with a third of its land vacant. The items that cite its decline are by now familiar: the loss of jobs as the automakers have fallen, the corruption, the unemployment, and on and on.

The article tries to present hope, but I find it difficult to see how turning an auto body plant into a haven for artists will stem the tide. There are new hotels, and the state is offering massive tax breaks to Hollywood; various Detroiters are quoted as saying that the city is a canvas upon which new and wondrous things can be wrought.

But even in a piece that wants to fill us with optimism, the news is pretty bleak. Here is the end of the story:

As America's 11th largest city tries to mount a comeback, locals battling lean times are far from the only stakeholders. "The problems facing Detroit are definitely going to be cropping up in cities all over the country," says Hollander. "The kind of devastated postindustrial landscape we associate with the Rust Belt is starting to creep into the Sun Belt and may start to become a universal problem." Says Covington: "The rest of the world is just catching up to the hard times we've been experiencing." Which is why the world is now watching Detroit with interest--and waiting to see if it finds a way to rise from the ashes.

Pretty thin evidence for a potential comeback here.

The good news is the cover story, written by novelist Kurt Andersen. The cover features a red RESET button and the text, "The End of Excess: Why this crisis is good for America." The subtitle inside ends, "How a reset can make America a saner, better place."

And I've now told you pretty much everything you need to know about this think piece. It's the standard "we've put ourselves into a big hole, but what will emerge will be brighter and more wonderful than ever." Yes, Andersen cites the ant and the grasshopper. There are also pop-culture swings by Homer Simpson (old bloated America - bad!) and Road Runner cartoons, references to silver linings and exhortations to continue thinking big grand thoughts. Our young peope will move away from the crass, money-making interests of their elders, and dedicate themselves to the public good. We'll be able to do housing right, avoiding our soul-crushing, resource-wasting suburban sprawl. And, as an extra bonus, we'll stop paying attention to Paris Hilton.

Finally, somewhere on the fifth page of five, Andersen gets more serious and confronts some of the hard reality. And you'll be happy to know that even our putative economic competitor doesn't have to be a problem:

Twenty-first century China is the greatest country of the 20th century. Muscular industrialism gets you only so far. Further increases in productivity and prosperity require ingenuity and enterprise applied at the micro scale — digital devices and networked systems, biotechnology, subatomic nanotechnology. As China and other developing countries finally achieve the industrial plenty that we enjoyed 50 years ago, the U.S. can stay ahead once again by pioneering the next-generation technologies that the increasingly industrialized world will require.

That's right, it's more of the idea that a country that can find no jobs for people who want to work in technology will somehow take the lead in developing the next big thing (other than Twitter or Facebook).

The other pillar of Andersen's strategy is that we need to take in more immigrants. He does qualify it by saying we need to, "to encourage as many as possible of the world's smartest and most ambitious people to become Americans." That we have no idea how to identify which of the people who want to come here are smart and ambitious does not deter Andersen in the least.

So what this boils down to is a cleverly-written article right out of the Noonan/Friedman handbook. All inconvenient realities, any recognition of the ways in which the world has dramatically changed, the need to temper balloon-headed thinking about "American ingenuity," these are swept away in a tide of feverish excitement about our "reconstruction and reinvention."

Very little of it is convincing; cheerleading will not get the job done (see Detroit above). Even if this time did present an opportunity to get real about what America can be, we're unlikely to do the hard work necessary. One need only listen to the various leaders, who are pretty well unanimous that we will get through this time, then return to the fervid, profligate ways we "enjoyed" before.

On second thought, TIME doesn't have any good news at all...

Participation and democracy

John McIntyre at You Don't Say has begun another fascinating thread, which started in response to a blogger "rejoicing in the death of the newspaper." (McIntyre's second post on the subject is here.) David Eaves essentially makes this case:

• Participation leads to greater democracy.
• Old media is not participative, it's presented.
• New media is participative.
• Therefore, new media is more supportive of democracy.
• So, we should be happy that new media is replacing old media.

McIntyre does such a good job of dismantling this argument that I should probably leave it alone, but I won't.

He questions the first point, arguing persuasively that it is "accurate information" that leads to greater democracy. This seems right to me; I've never actually believed that mere participation was sufficient for democracy. I'm not one of those who thinks voting should be mandatory, that the votes of those who vote for the Irish name (or whatever criterion they use) should count as much as those who spend time evaluating candidates and issues (not that there should be a test, just that showing up is as close a proxy for knowledge as we're likely to get).

It's almost too easy to point out that participation as measured by blog comments or Wikipedia is a false democracy, as blather (or, all too often, hate) tends to permeate the "discussion":

Look at the news stories on sites that permit comments — a story followed by, say, 157 comments. After the first dozen, the responses become duplicative. Cranks arrive. If the comments are not mediated, there’s an excellent chance that the “conversation” will sink into vulgar abuse and the racists and anti-Semites will crawl out into the sunlight.

The second point above seems slightly more persuasive in an era of Fox News and other overtly partisan outlets. The profit motive has too often replaced judgment, but, and I think McIntyre would agree with me, the solution is not getting rid of old media, it's raising our expectations of it. He effectively argues that the old system has served us quite well, for the most part:

It has been the task of the newspaper to perform the functions necessary to permit such reflection and choice: investigation and reporting, selection of significant information, verification of its accuracy, and publication in a clear and compact form. And despite the sneers at our outdated 19th-century industrial model, with reporters answering to assigning editors and copy editors independently examining the texts, we can still do the job tolerably well.

I'll add one more thing: the argument laid out by Eaves depends on a hidden assumption, that new media and old media are independent, that one can replace the other with no loss. That is nonsense, if old media disappears, new media will have little raw material with which to work.

[I flipped McIntyre's title, Democracy and Participation. I'll leave it to the reader to determine what percentage of that is homage, what percentage laziness.]

I have failed

I know that you, Gentle Reader, look to me for my opinions on issues of globalization. As such, I imagine that you are all anticipating my take on yesterday's Charlie Rose show, not the part on female desire, but the interview with Nandan Nilekani, co-chair of big Indian offshorer Infosys, who has a new book, and Thomas Friedman of the New York Times, who has the same old books to plug.

I wanted to watch and listen and give my impressions, to offer up some insights as to what I saw as flaws in the logic, on how these high priests of globalization would discuss changes to the model in light of the world financial crisis. Of course, I didn't expect them to take up basic questions of how American politicians justify visa policy or offshoring, but I could hope.

And then they launched into the interview, and the first thing they talked about was how Nandan gave Tom the idea for his Einsteinian revelation that, THE WORLD IS FLAT. It's a story that sums up the work of Friedman so well that I recreate it here (from the transcript on Rose's web site):

CHARLIE ROSE: The least. Just quickly, let’s review that. What happened? You were in India.

THOMAS FRIEDMAN: And Nandan was actually out of the country when I came over. And we had shot about 60 hours of film over 11 days. And over those 11 days, I was getting this sinking feeling that something really big had happened with globalization, and I had missed it. But I couldn’t quite put my finger on it.

And the last interview was with Nandan. He just came back. And the film crew was setting up in his office. I was sitting on the couch outside. Nandan came out, we sat down, I took out my laptop, as is my habit, and started interviewing him.

And at one point, Nandan said, “Tom, I’ve got to tell you, the global economic playing field is being leveled.” And it all just sort of -- I said global economic -- leveled -- and I wrote down in my notebook -- and we did the interview. But that just stuck in my head. And in the Jeep on the way back to the hotel, I just kept going over the global economic playing field is being leveled. I said the global -- but Nandan said global economic playing field is kind of being flattened. And then it just sort of popped into my head that what Nandan Nilekani, India’s premiere engineer-entrepreneur was telling me was that the world was flat, and that was a book.

And then we actually went over to his house that day. It was your birthday, I think, right?

You know, historians of the future are going to be so lucky. We have little idea how Tolstoy came up with the concept of War and Peace, but we have in laborious detail the story of how Tom Friedman came up with the flat world idea. And we will also know that Friedman was a very important man, because he dealt only with very important people, and was even invited to their homes on his birthday.

I don't want to belabor the infelicities that define the "thought entity" that was Tom Friedman (but I can't resist one; as David Smick showed in his book, the financial world is curved, even crooked; Friedman's flat world is a vinyl sheet laid on a non-smooth underfloor, and we're seeing the results of that now - it's a lousy analogy, and I'm royally tired of it), but, as he launched into this story for the umpteenth time, I couldn't take it any more. I grabbed the remote and turned to something, anything else.

You see, I could just tell how this interview was going to go. Friedman, there for no appreciable reason other than to give his NYT bestseller cred to his buddy's new book, was going to butt into the conversation whenever he could with yet another faux insight, and Rose would let him get away with it. Nilekani would likely get very little time to talk about his book, even though Charlie would hold it up a couple of times. The viewers would gain no insight into, well, anything. Then Charlie, Tom, and Nandan would head out to one of New York's finest steakhouses for a big piece of beef and a couple of bottles of wine, while Charlie and Nandan would wait around for another Friedman gem ("It's interesting that beef and wine are both red, and businesspeople love both of them, but they hate it when their numbers are in the red - there's a book there, and I'll call it "The Redding of Business.")

In the interest of serving my public, I went back today and checked out the transcript of the interview (mercifully, there isn't one of the steak dinner). And it went just as I said. Nilekani made some banal observations about the challenges facing India today - his book may be better than that, I don't know. Any attempt to dig deeper was interrupted by Friedman's usual drivel (six-lane superhighway, market and Mother Nature hitting a wall, sustainable living, we're not too big to fail - all the usual stuff that real people have been seeing for years, but comes as revelation to this Pulitzer winner).

What's sad is what's always sad. There is a real opportunity to ask Nilekani some tough probing questions. They don't have to be adversarial, they just have to be firm, recognizing the challenges that confront these two nations. Maybe he's dealt with them in his book, maybe he hasn't, but they are questions that won't be asked on any broadcast outlet in this country other than, possibly, PBS.

And Charlie Rose missed this chance, so busy was he offering hospitality just short of cigars and brandy. But it isn't polite to let Friedman ramble on in the same vein as he always does, it's a disservice to the viewers. Rose needs to emerge from what I like to call his Friedman fog; if Tom's presence isn't a help, get him off the show.

A new blog

I don't mean this to become the "Commenting on Joe Posnanski" blog (though I might get more readers if I did), but I'm going to mention him yet again. Posnanski is the excellent sportswriter who writes for the Kansas City Star, Sports Illustrated, and has a very entertaining blog that is mostly about sports. (He also has a new book coming out in September, but I'll let him push that on his blog.)

He started a new blog a couple of days ago, and I'll let him describe what it's about:

So, here's the concept of this blog: Newspapers, we all know, are drowning. There are reasons for this, numerous reasons, some complicated, some very simple, some interesting, some boring as sin. The times are changing. The economy is in the tank. Readership is breaking into niche audiences. The business model is broken. Print is dying. Newspapers lost touch with readers. Readers lost touch with newspapers. On and on and on and on and on.

People also feel very differently about what's happening to papers. Some say good riddance. Some worry for the future of Democracy. Some believe newspapers wrote their own death notice with their greed and stubborn reluctance to adjust to a changing world. Some believe this future was inevitable, that the overpowering newspaper business that once existed could not survive, it had to be picked apart piece by piece like the fish in "Old Man and the Sea." Some believe that a technological breakthrough and an economic turn can put newspapers (or whatever they will be called by then) a new life -- there are more readers now than ever before. Some think that if you hooked up a heart monitor to the newspaper business right now, you'd get a straight line.

The blog is called The Future of Newspapers, and, even though Posnanski has not mentioned my post that, coincidentally, came out the same day (The future of journalism), I thought I'd steer any of you who have an interest in this topic to it. What it will become, I don't know, but I always find it intriguing to get in on the ground floor of a blog that discusses topics in which I have an interest.

He's so funny

Rush Limbaugh is truly one of the great comedians of our times. He professes to be the voice of the Republican party even as he points the way to its demise.

He hopes that Obama will fail. Even though he is theoretically in touch with "the people," he misses the reality that Obama is perceived as trying to fix the country's woes. Hoping that he will fail is the same, in most people's eyes, as hoping the country will fail. Of course, he says now that's not what he meant, that he simply didn't want Obama's techniques of fixing the economy to succeed. Sure not what it sounded like.

Now Limbaugh says, "I am all for the AIG bonuses." Even the people who believe that they need to be paid because of contracts, or who think these all-so-talented folks need to be retained to undo the harm they've created, would not be "all for" the payments.

Perhaps Limbaugh has simply talked so much that he can no longer hear, or, just maybe, he is a brilliant conceptual comedian. What he is not is someone that anyone should listen to for insight on the country's condition.

The future of journalism

Several trends have come together lately, and I think that I can make a prediction as to what the future of journalism is. Recently, we've seen the folding of the Rocky Mountain News and the complete web-ification of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, every industry expert is predicting the demise of many more newspapers, and large media companies have or will file for bankruptcy.

Journalism is one of those fields, like education, that is forever catching up with business trends and presenting them as new-found knowledge. As newspapers and TV stations are folded into large "media companies," they will be treated as any other subsidiaries, with the same ethic and behavioral structure.

In particular, branding will be seen as the way to add value. For those not up on cutting-edge marketing lingo, branding is the practice of creating value in a product that is not intrinsically in the product. The classic example is the soft drink industry, which sells flavored sugar water at far higher prices than would be warranted by the cost of ingredients and distribution. The high margins are justified by "brand value," the feeling of homespun comfort you get when you drink Coca-Cola, or the youthful outlook of Pepsi-Cola. A lot of this is pretentious claptrap, but it works well enough that "branding" has become the unifying concept of the consumer goods market.

Local television news has known this for some time, so we have the female anchor who acts like nothing so much as a party hostess, ushering us into her living room to hear 10-second snatches of the news of the day. Chicago's CBS affiliate tried an experiment several years ago, of having one of our more respected journalists, Carol Marin, host a serious news program that might cover a story in depth, making room by giving only 30 seconds to the weather...and it was a total failure (at least in terms of the only thing that counts, the ratings). The brand message of local news is, "Come join us for some family fun; we'll slip in some serious news :-(, but we'll have the zany weather guy, and the zany sports guy, and generally enjoy a good time," and the ratings measure how successfully any "news" organization fulfills this strategy.

In print, we've heard of layoffs of reporters who cover uninteresting things like business, we've heard of publishers talking about "news productivity," and we've seen a greater emphasis on soft topics - even important news is increasingly covered with a kind of breezy irreverence.

So what I think is going to happen is that reporters are going to have to become brands, and they will be charged with providing an endless stream of content that can be "repurposed" by "content managers" (no editors here) to the various media platforms that are part of the modern news organization. A columnist will write pretty much nonstop, and some portion of that writing will go to the print newspaper (if there is one), some will go to the blog, some will go to the Twitter feed.

Someone like Eric Zorn of the Chicago Tribune will churn out endless words. I pick Zorn because he was one of the first mainstream journalists to get a blog, and he is now up on Twitter. His print column, which used to be pretty much it for him, is now a tiny proportion of his weekly output. I don't know what kind of pressure is on him to be typing all the time, but it can only intensify as the Zorn brand becomes increasingly important to the health of the Tribune company.

And that brings us to Q Score, the measurement of a public figure or product's penetration and popularity. Q Scores will be used to determine which "content provider" is reaching the public, and it will become a vital part of the decision to retain certain reporters or columnists. Each company will have to decide which part of the score they wish to emphasize, but, since attention is what every company craves, it's likely that penetration will be the dominant factor. We'll see more "controversial" writers in place of solid thinking and writing (hence, new media star Karl Rove).

It's not entirely impossible that this strategy will be successful enough that there will be money sufficient to support some of the traditional news-gathering tasks, such as investigative reporting or foreign bureaus. I'm not real hopeful, because part of this strategy is to pick the low-hanging fruit, and any activity that doesn't generate profits on its own is going to be discarded.

That's the future: the successful journalist will be the guy or gal who can pump out vast numbers of words (thinking optional) and can be appealing enough to gain a high Q Score, to be branded. It will not be cost-effective to have a reporter spend four months on a story that only generates a few thousand words, so depth will decline. Competition for "branded" reporters will be high, so the stars will make more money. On the other hand, the probability of a young reporter catching on will be far lower. If print survives at all, it will only do so because of failings in the Internet advertising model. Expect more multimedia figures, as the columnist will do a two-hour radio show and write longer-form pieces for the magazine section; this will lead to a breakdown in specialties, as we want to hear what the "star" has to say about the banking crisis. Therefore, we'll see less expertise as the brands are spread across the news universe (in other words, there will be no sportswriters or political writers, we'll just have the usual subjects commenting on whatever's hot).

It's difficult to see this as positive for those of us who actually value the gathering of news, but it could save the business ("Hey, let's see what Angelina Jolie is writing about today!").

Also: I didn't mean to imply that Q Scores would be the only metric; obviously Internet page clicks will be an important input as well. That these numbers may have little to do with actual quality will be of little consequence.

If only you were there too, Tom

Yglesias gets it exactly right in a comment on Tom Friedman's latest bit of brilliance. First, Tom:

There is a huge amount of money on the sidelines eager to bet again on America. But right now, there is too much uncertainty; no one knows what will be the new rules governing investments in our biggest financial institutions. If President Obama can produce and sell that plan, private investors, big and small, will give us a stimulus like you’ve never seen.

Which is why I wake up every morning hoping to read this story: “President Obama announced today that he had invited the country’s 20 leading bankers, 20 leading industrialists, 20 top market economists and the Democratic and Republican leaders in the House and Senate to join him and his team at Camp David. ‘We will not come down from the mountain until we have forged a common, transparent strategy for getting us out of this banking crisis,’ the president said, as he boarded his helicopter.”

Yglesias:

Beyond the bipartisanship, in the real world this would be in practice a recipe for rule-by-CEO. A key constraint on the decision-making would need to be that it served the personal financial interests of the 20 “leading bankers” and “leading industrialists” (whatever that might mean) and there’s no reason to think that would serve the public interest. It would be interesting to speculate about what would happen if you held a meeting with all those people and gave them some kind of truth serum that made them speak honestly and bargain in good faith, but that’s not going to happen. Instead, the way the system works is that Obama and has team will need to craft a response and will need to take responsibility for its success or failure.

Of course, this is the usual Friedman recipe for every problem, journalistic or otherwise. Find the nearest rich person, assume that they will act for the common interest instead of their own, and let them run with the ball. If you read Friedman at all closely, you'll see that his interactions are invariably with sheiks and CEOs and princes and international consultants. His few mentions of "regular people" come from other people's reporting.

The rich are hurting, but not that much

Forbes is out with its annual look at the richest people in the world. This is a pointless exercise for many reasons, not the least of which is the unreality of the numbers. Let's say that Bill Gates has a crisis of some sort, and he has to turn all his holdings into cash. There's no way that he's going to be able to sell all his Microsoft stock at the same price; as he starts to sell, the price will drop, and the last share he sells will be at a severely lower price. But that's only a technical objection.

This is more a post about innumeracy. Take a quote from the Reuters story about this exercise:

The net worth of the world's billionaires fell from $4.4 trillion to $2.4 trillion, while the number of billionaires was down to 793 from 1,125.

(The way Forbes itself put it is similar:

The world's richest are also a lot poorer. Their collective net worth is $2.4 trillion, down $2 trillion from a year ago.

The reader is left with the impression that these chieftains have lost 45% of their riches. Perhaps that's supposed to make us feel better about the similar drops we've seen in our 401(k)'s. But, how did Forbes get these numbers?

They took all the billionaires on the list from last year, added up their values, then did the same for this year, and compared. This technique, however, is spurious, because, as is stated in the clause in the Reuters quote above, there are a lot fewer billionaires on the list.

It's as if we compared the wealth of two countries through GDP without correcting for the population - oh, wait, the press does that all the time, too. To be fair, Forbes does mention the average (down 23%), but the first number has no business being reported at all. If I had to guess, I would wager that I would find this impossible to explain to any news editor.

Magic from Brooks, and responses

As another illustration of the kind of journalistic thinking I talked about in my last post, see Brad DeLong for a couple of deconstructions of the newest David Brooks effort.  It's a typical example of Brooks Big-Think that devolves into incoherence, and Joe Klein and Ed Kilgore do a nice job of laying it bare.